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Roger Ver bets $1M that Bitcoin Cash will not be ‘short-lived’




Bitcoin.com chief executive Roger Ver has issued a $1 million challenge to F2Pool owner Wang Chun, who has claimed at a blockchain conference in Hong Kong that Bitcoin Cash "will be short-lived."

The two executives were part of a roundtable discussion at the Bitkan-hosted 2017 Shape the Future Blockchain Global Summit, debating on the potentials of Bitcoin Cash versus the original Bitcoin. For his part, Wang said Bitcoin Cash will be abandoned soon, or as early as November, when another hard fork is expected to happen.

Roger Ver bets $1M that Bitcoin Cash will not be 'short-lived'"Bitcoin Cash will be short-lived compared with earlier attempts because we will soon have another one coming very soon… after SegWit2X is introduced," Wang said.

The F2Pool co-owner's comment caught the ire of Ver, a confessed fan of Bitcoin Cash, prompting him to issue a bet.

"How short-lived do you think Bitcoin Cash will be and would you be interested in making a wager about that?" Ver asked. "I'd like to bet $1 million on that and I'll give you two-year time frame."

Ver, an early Bitcoin investor, said he is a fan of Bitcoin Cash due to its low fees and fast confirmations, which makes it much more in line with the original vision of true decentralized, peer-to-peer electronic cash with more efficient transaction capacity.

"Anybody who use Bitcoin I think you know… the network's completely full and caused a horrible user experience, so I think everybody else in this stage wants Bitcoin to have a good user experience for people, and Mr. Wang Chun here thinks [the] Bitcoin network is not full and it's not a problem at all… He's blaming it on spammers, spammers are just people who use the Bitcoin network… so you can decide for yourself whose stand seems more reasonable here," Ver said.

In an interview on the sidelines of the event, Ver said Bitcoin Cash is the answer to Bitcoin's scaling problem.

"From day one, the plan was always to allow the blocks to become as big as they needed to be in order to accommodate people using Bitcoin, so the fact that this has become a problem with Bitcoin now is actually a sign of its success. Bitcoin Cash is the answer to that problem," Ver told CoinGeek. "Blockstream and these other guys that want to intentionally make the fees high and the confirmations of Bitcoin transactions slow or indeterminate, like, of course people don't want to use that. Bitcoin Cash is much more useful for people that actually want to use it as money."